Haunted place · Dublin, Ireland

Shelbourne Hotel

Updated November 202632 sources How to visit

5 archive documents

Dublin's grand hotel on St Stephen's Green, founded in 1824. Guests tell of 'Mary Masters', a little girl's ghost first described by Hans Holzer in the 1960s.

The story

The Shelbourne occupies a landmark building on the northern edge of St Stephen's Green, the great Georgian square at the heart of Dublin. Martin Burke, from County Tipperary, founded it in 1824 by buying three neighboring townhouses facing the Green, and he named the business after William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne. A major redesign by John McCurdy was completed in 1867.

The hotel quickly drew distinguished guests. William Makepeace Thackeray stayed in 1842 and wrote about it in The Irish Sketch-Book the following year. Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, checked in during a quiet visit to Ireland in July 1877. In the early 1900s Alois Hitler Jr., Adolf Hitler's older half-brother, worked at the hotel during his time in Dublin. Late in the 19th century Sir Thomas Talbot Power, a baronet with a passion for driving his own coach, ran a coach-and-four for paying passengers from the Shelbourne to Bray and back, with dinner at the International Hotel in between and, usually, champagne on Sir Thomas. An advertisement for the hotel survives in the Dublin Almanac of 1844.

The Shelbourne also had a front-row seat at Irish independence. During the Easter Rising of 1916, about 40 British soldiers under a Captain Andrews occupied the hotel to fire on the Irish Citizen Army and Volunteers under Michael Mallin, who had dug in on the Green opposite. Six years later, in 1922, a committee chaired by Michael Collins drafted the Constitution of the Irish Free State in Room 112, still known as the Constitution Room.

The Cotton Jury family owned the hotel for almost a century before selling it in 1960 to Trust House Hotels, later the Forte Group. It then passed through a long series of corporate owners and operators, including Le Méridien, Granada, Compass Group, Nomura and the Royal Bank of Scotland, before a consortium of Irish developers spent €125 million renovating it in the mid-2000s. After the financial crash it was bought out of receivership in 2014. Its restored facade won an Irish Georgian Society award in 2016, and the hotel has operated under a Marriott brand since 2004.

The legend

The Shelbourne's ghost is a little girl usually called Mary Masters, said to be about seven years old and to haunt the upper floors, the sixth floor in particular. According to the story, cholera killed her, most likely in one of the private houses that occupied the site before Burke's hotel. Even that is uncertain: one IrishCentral article, citing the Irish Independent, dates her death to 1846, while a later one gives 1791. Her name does not appear in any hotel record. It came from a medium.

The earliest dated account found is The Lively Ghosts of Ireland (1967) by the American ghost writer Hans Holzer. A Kirkus reviewer noted that the book includes Mary Masters, "a seven year old child who just happens to inhabit Dame Sybil's hotel room," meaning the psychic Sybil Leek, and observed how heavily he leaned on her psychic impressions. The review does not name the hotel. Popular retellings disagree even on the room number, 526 or 256.

Since then the reports have followed a familiar pattern. Guests describe taps, sinks and showers in the "haunted room" turning on by themselves. Speaking to an RTÉ documentary crew, managers said that on several occasions guests had run screaming from the room; the program-makers reported two or three guests a week over a six-month period, and a staff member sent to spend the night there emerged, a colleague said, "as white as a sheet," once the taps started running. In August 2013 the actress Lily Collins told Jimmy Fallon on NBC that, while staying at the Shelbourne earlier that year to film Love, Rosie, she had felt that someone was there, heard a child's giggle, felt air rushing past her and heard doors slamming, and that staff afterward told her about Mary. (A later IrishCentral update mistakenly links her stay to another film, The Mortal Instruments.)

There is a skeptical counterweight. The hotel's own history page says nothing about any ghost. Tim Kelly of the group Irish Ghost Hunters, who planned an investigation here, said that roughly nine "haunted" cases in ten turn out to have ordinary causes such as plumbing, wiring or rodents, which is worth remembering when the main phenomenon is a running tap in a building of this age. The ghost of Mary Masters rests on a psychic's reading reported in a 1967 book, a disputed date and no documentary trace that we could find.

What remains today

The Shelbourne remains a five-star working hotel in its historic building, its facade refurbished in 2016. Room 112, the Constitution Room, preserves the memory of 1922, and the hotel still hosts public events: UEFA held the draw for the 2019 Nations League Finals there in December 2018. A major renovation was reported as scheduled for late 2025, though we could not confirm its status, so some parts of the building may look different from older photographs.

Visiting

The Shelbourne is a private, working hotel, so the way to see the inside is as a customer, by booking a stay; check the official website for what is open to non-residents. We found no ghost tour run by the hotel. Guest floors are private: do not wander the corridors looking for the haunted room unless you are staying, and respect other guests. The facade can be admired freely from St Stephen's Green, a public park, which is also where the 1916 fighting that the hotel overlooked took place.

The ghosts

Child ghost

Mary Masters

Said to be A girl of about seven said to have died of cholera, probably in a townhouse that preceded the hotel; undocumented in hotel records

Psychic Sybil Leek and writer Hans Holzer named the child by 1967, and she is linked to taps turning on, a giggle and slamming doors on the upper floors. Her death date is disputed and we found no record of her.

Laughter
Doors opening
Moving objects

First reported: By 1967 (Holzer's book). Reported by: Hans Holzer, The Lively Ghosts of Ireland (1967); Sybil Leek; Lily Collins (The Tonight Show, 2013); hotel management via RTÉ